


Limits

by divingforstones



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Post S7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-14
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-04 13:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1781257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divingforstones/pseuds/divingforstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"James doesn’t even process the words for a moment, so different are they from what he’d feared he was about to hear. He can feel himself gazing at Robbie in pure confusion."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>After his resignation from the police force, James Hathaway is trying to move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Limits

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to wendymr for all her work beta'ing this and talking it through, and all the encouragement - a huge help. Thanks to both wendymr and lindenharp for their very insightful suggestions which made a big difference.
> 
> Starts shortly after Intelligent Design

Part I:  
_A Friday evening in July. Laura Hobson’s House._

 

“Is James all right, Robbie?” Laura’s query comes rather abruptly.

“Yeah,” Robbie says, surprised. But he feels a slight tension just begin to pull him back from his state of Friday-evening relaxation, all the same.

Laura had been quiet, driving back to hers. And now she hasn’t relaxed against him, despite the wine glass in her hand. She’s staying rather within her own space despite his inviting arm along the back of her couch, and she’s obviously not really watching this film. She’s cast a look at him a couple of times, though, that’s only confirmed to Robbie that she has something on her mind. And that it must be something that she’s unusually reluctant to raise.

But he’d thought James was doing much better now. Isn’t he? Has she seen something he’s missed? “Did he say something to you?”

“No. He did seem fine to me. A lot more like himself than last time I saw him.”

“That’s what I thought,” Robbie says warmly, expansively. Because he’s undeniably relieved at this further confirmation.

Leaving the force has seemed to work for James. It’s only in the past couple of weeks, seeing him start to look better in some indefinable way, more at ease with himself—well, in as much as James ever seems at ease with himself—that it’s really hit home to Robbie just how wretched his sergeant had looked towards the end of his time in the job.

It had just all seemed to happen in such a rushed, rather disconcerting, fashion, though. That’s what must have made it all a bit disturbing now. Between the leave that James was owed and his time accrued, his actual notice period had seemed startlingly short. Not enough to allow a person to really get their head around the adjustment, that’s what Robbie thinks.

He’d certainly felt that James should’ve stayed until he was clearer on what he was doing next. And then—well, Robbie’s own deliberations over his retirement had somehow rather faded into thinking that, really, another year or so wouldn’t do any harm, would it, now? He could always make the effort to get up to Manchester a bit more often while he was still on the job, couldn’t he? Actually use up more of his own leave.

And he hadn’t expected James to change his mind, as such. He had grasped by then that leaving was something James badly needed to do, for himself. He just—well, even though his newly-qualified sergeant is promising, she has potential—it’s bound to be strange for a bit, isn’t it? Just inevitable.

So seeing James looking, this evening, like perhaps the weight of the world was no longer solely on his shoulders, that had provided a certain rather-needed consolation.

You could put up with a lot, really, Robbie had reflected—watching James beside him, gesturing, absorbed in what he was telling Laura—just to see the lad looking that bit better, starting to deliver quips back at you with that dry wit again, levelling that grin at you a bit more often. It did boost Robbie, somehow, to see him like that. It had felt sort of comforting.

And it had landed up being a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

First there had been the weekly pint with James that he somehow—well, Friday was just a better day for having it to look forward to. At the end of a working week that’s still rather shocking in its disorientation, the amount of times that he turns for James and finds he isn’t there. So it had been good to see him properly. Almost a relief, it had felt like, when Robbie had arrived and seen the blond-haired back-view of that so-familiar tall figure, casually dressed these days, slouched down a bit in the wooden chair, long legs crossed, obviously contemplating the river.

And then, Laura, getting out of work that bit later than Robbie, had joined them, a self-designated driver but seeming quite fine to stay on for a while all the same. They’d been propelled inside by the grey summer drizzle just as she arrived, but it hadn’t put much of a dampener on things for Robbie. Robbie had been pleasantly relaxed, rather content, actually, to sit with both Laura and James and listen to them catching up with James expanding on his application for his research course, to her interested ears.

The only fly in the ointment had been that Laura had begun casting that look at him a bit. And now, it seems, somehow, that it’s got something to do with James? Although she’s not making much sense, so far.

“I think he’s back on track, sort of,” he tells her now. “But why d’you ask?”

“I just thought he might have been upset, perhaps, before I joined you,” she says slowly. “Or maybe he was talking about what he’ll do, where he’ll go, if he doesn’t get on this course?” She’s turned to face him now, legs pulled up, curled up on her couch. And she still doesn’t look relaxed.

“Why?” he asks, again, and he hears his voice emerge just as slowly because somehow she’s not allaying his concerns about James in the slightest now. The contentment of this evening is starting to fade away as her words start to stir up again all that anxiety that had first flared up weeks ago, once James had told him, on that bridge, had properly got it across to Robbie, that he couldn’t do this any more, couldn’t keep going. “Why d’you think that? That James was upset?”

“Because if he wasn’t upset, if there’s really nothing wrong—” She stops to study the depths of her wine glass, but she doesn’t drink from it. Then she lifts her head and he feels a sudden further inexplicable qualm at the way she’s looking at him now. “Then it does beg the question, Robbie, why were you sitting against him like that, seeking him out like that this evening?”

“I was not.” Robbie is astonished.

“Think back,” she advises him, rather briefly.

Robbie can suddenly feel, like an imprint, James’s warm presence right beside him, against him. But that doesn’t mean that’s a memory from tonight. It could be from many times over the years.

“I—your friend came along, that was it,” he says, feeling a disproportionate swell of relief that, actually, there’s a very reasonable answer to this. “Soon as we went inside. While I was at the bar, remember?” And she’d obviously sat down on the bench beside Laura to talk to her for a bit. Robbie, of course, had gestured to her to stay put when he returned and had just slid in beside James, who’d moved over to let him in. Right over, actually, leaving Robbie more room than usual, come to think of it. So how had he landed up…but Laura is just gazing at him now and he’s beginning to feel a certain urge to come up with more of an answer.

“He’s a bit of a heat-seeking animal, James. I couldn’t tell you exactly which animals do that but the man himself could probably give you chapter and verse.” _On that and most other random topics you care to mention._ He cocks his head at her, amused. She doesn’t return his smile.

“It’s not just James. It’s you as well. In fact—I don’t think it was James at all this evening. He doesn’t anymore. It was you.”

“Force of habit,” he explains.

“Yeah?”

“When you’re used to working with a bloke as your partner for years—” _And then he resigns. Best thing for him, all right, but—he just leaves. And it’s strange. How big a gap that leaves. It’s just strange._

“You worked with Morse for years,” Laura is continuing. “Can’t say I ever noticed you sitting like that with him.”

He gives her a look of fond exasperation now, because after all she’s one of the few people left who remembers Morse the way he does, remembers Robbie being his sergeant, but she’s still not really responding somehow. She’s looking at him with unwarranted gravity. Something rather uncomfortable seems to settle on him. He shifts on the couch, dropping his arm and reaches for his own beer glass, trying to shake off that feeling. “Morse was different, love,” he says. “As well you know.”

“And then there was Ali,” she persists. “She was your sergeant. Before you went away. Never saw you sit like that with her, touch her like that.”

Christ, what’s she doing bringing up Ali, of all people? It’s hardly the best topic and it’s unlike her to be so insensitive.

“I was a happily married man,” he says, stiffly, remembering suddenly saying the same to Ali herself, when she’d asked a similar question. No, not a similar question, he thinks confusedly. Not the same. Ali had asked why he’d never tried it on with her. Laura’s asking about why he and James—different topic altogether, that, how he and James sit or touch or whatever. That’s got nothing to do with people trying it on with other people. He shouldn’t be mixing the questions up.

“Then there’s your new sergeant.” God, she’s really not letting this drop. “I’d be remarkably surprised, Robbie, if you sat like that with Julie.”

“That would be completely inappropriate,” he says, feeling a surge of genuine anger now, amongst the confusion of this sudden conversation. “And you know it.”

“Why?”

“Why? She’s my sergeant, she’s a young woman. She’s—Laura—” He can’t believe she’s even suggesting that he’d ever sit against Julie like that. Like the way he sits against James—although—like he sits against James?

“James was your sergeant. He's only just stopped being your sergeant. You most certainly did it then, too. James is young—not that I think your age difference really matters with James, frankly…”

“Laura.”

“Although James is, of course, a man.”

“Yes, exactly,” he says, relieved, “So you see there’s no risk of any—misinterpretation.” He delivers that in a final tone. But this is, after all, Laura. So she simply ignores the note of finality in his voice. God, you shouldn’t get into arguments about things like this with people who know you this well.

“You seem very sure of that.”

“Yeah. Well, neither of us are—” But he isn’t very sure just what way James is or isn’t inclined. Ruddy Yorkie bars being presented to him on ruddy street corners, or not. He’s not sure of that at all. But—well, James knows Robbie isn’t, that’s the difference, isn’t it? James wouldn’t ever think or misinterpret that just because Robbie enjoys having James warm against him, doesn’t really take notice of it, as such, just finds it pleasant and sort of natural after all these years, rather enjoys the unquestioning comfort of it, that it means anything like that. “James knows that’s just a mates’ thing.”

“Sit like that with any other mates, do you?” Laura asks, still with that assessing gaze.

Bloody hell. “You’d be good in an interrogation room, you would,” he suggests, aiming to lighten the mood. She would too. But they seem to have gone beyond the point where they can comfortably joke this aside. Because he’s beginning to see that it matters to her. She seems, under all that calm, to be finding this conversation almost as disconcerting as he is. Which makes him wonder why they’re having it.

He tries one last time to explain to her, to reassure her that she’s really heading down the wrong road here. “Look—if we were two women. If this was you and a female friend—all right sitting against each other a bit—no-one would think that was strange, would they? I wouldn’t.”

“No, probably not. But I’m saying this about _you_. _You_ don’t sit like that with anyone else, or seek them out with touch the way you do with James.”

“I do with you,” he says, rather stupidly, but his brain is coming up short now, and failing to provide him with any other answer.

She gives him a rather familiar look of impatience. It’s as if he’s asked her for information at a crime scene that he really should know she doesn’t have yet. It’s her you-know-better look. “You and I—we’re _in_ a relationship.”

He’s casting about a bit now inside his own mind, for some reason finding this harder to explain than it should be. “James is kind of an affectionate bloke. Physically.”

“No, he isn’t. Not in general. He just doesn’t seem to have any sense of personal space when it comes to you.”

“You’re wrong.”

And right up until this moment, he hasn’t wanted her to clarify what she’s getting at here, so much as he’s wanted to reassure her so she doesn’t look upset or—well, just get her off this strange choice of topic. But it now seems important to convince her that she’s wrong, when suddenly everything feels a bit—unstable, teetering on the edge. Not just things in this fledgling relationship with Laura, but deeper down. She’s making him feel rather shaken up deeper down.

“I’m not wrong, Robbie.”

“God, James, he—doesn’t even hug me, he—”

“I know. Nothing so intentional on his part. He has his own set limits, that’s what I think. But he just cleaves to you, gravitates straight into your space and you into his. Shadows you and sinks into your rhythms. I mean, it was fascinating to watch sometimes, when you were at work. The way that the two of you were so thoroughly, utterly in sync. The way you could communicate with each other with the smallest glance. I bet you notice that difference now with Julie, don’t you? Now that you find you need to verbalise instructions that you’ve become used to giving with a movement of your eyebrow. But you don’t even think about how close you are with James. Crouching down beside each other over corpses, sitting right against each other on benches at pub tables. It was always sort of endearing. It’s not endearing any more,” she says, half to herself.

Robbie feels suddenly a bit stricken by the last bit. A bit—guilty, almost. With nothing to feel guilty about, he tries to assure himself. She’s just getting the wrong end of the stick, and it’s just very unlike her. She’s certainly not in the least bit possessive.

“And in case you haven’t noticed, Robbie, James is trying to hold back from you now, since we got together. And you’re the one who still keeps doing it.”

 _Is_ he? Is _that_ what James is at—trying to hold back? And Robbie feels the truth of that hit him, a few recurring concerns that he’s had to work a bit hard to allay over the past while, suddenly, irrevocably, coming together.

Because James meets up for the regular weekly pint, like clockwork. But he’s always busy, in a rather vaguely unspecified manner, whenever Robbie spontaneously suggests that they meet on any other night when Laura has her own commitments.

And they’ve somehow never actually managed to have James over to dinner with them—yet, of course, it’s just yet—at Laura’s, or even Robbie’s. Which could be to do with work and scheduling on their parts or James being very taken up with his research application and that private tutoring and exploring what to do long-term if his application isn’t successful. But then—it could also be because of James’s habit of agreeing that that would be nice, but never actually letting Robbie know when he’s free…The one thing Robbie does know, because it’s been eating at him a bit, is that he somehow doesn’t see enough of James anymore, somehow can’t seem to get hold of him outside of that Friday evening drink.

It had almost felt like an achievement, this evening, getting James to agree to come round to Robbie’s tomorrow and give him a hand shifting furniture—hell, did James only agree to that out of concern for Robbie’s back? _Is_ he trying to avoid Robbie outside the limits of that weekly pint?

Laura may be onto something there, and he’ll have to see if he can joke James out of that unnecessary reticence. Christ, it’s not like Robbie has just started a new relationship, with some new woman, all of a sudden; he’s just taken the next logical step with Laura. It shouldn’t cause waves really, shouldn’t cause this much of a problem somehow. James knows and likes Laura that much and he’s supported Robbie in moving towards a relationship with her over all those years, even when Robbie hadn’t really moved forward with her—so, all right, something does need to be sorted out there with James.

“You don’t even see it, Robbie.”

And, okay, so he misses the bloke. More than he’d even thought he might. And he is feeling protective of him just now, so it’s no wonder, really, that he might have, unthinkingly, been drawn to move into James’s space this evening. And if he did, he should rethink the appropriateness of that, for Laura’s sake. Is that what she wants?

But Laura’s still watching him, still quite intent and he suddenly knows, with a sinking feeling, that this is about to become about a whole lot more than touch.

“He puts a bit of space between you like he did this evening and then you come and sit down right beside him. Like you feel him trying to pull himself away from you and you just go straight after him. Because that’s what you’re used to doing, responding to any shifts in the distance between you without thinking. Anytime he did that over the years, pulled away from you, any time you felt you were losing him somehow, it completely threw you—God, we got together when he went off to Kosovo—”

The timing of that has got nothing to do with this. “I was worried about him those times, there were other things going on. And James—he just needs keeping an eye on, sometimes, so of course the thought of him leaving if he doesn’t get his course, not seeing him, makes me feel anxious. He’s just a bit different, James, always has been—”

“Does it?”

“What?”

“Does the thought of not seeing James make you feel anxious?”

He lifts his beer glass and then puts it back down, rather sharply. “Well, yeah. I just _said_ that, I explained. He just could do with an eye kept on him right now, he’s—”

“Don’t put this on James. I know he’s been worrying you quite badly just recently, hasn’t he? But you know he’ll right himself again soon now that he’s left the force, you know he’ll be okay. So?”

“So—what?” He has to make quite an effort to keep his voice even now, because there’s the stupidest swell in his throat and it’s making his words come out gruffer than he intends. And she just keeps _looking_ at him.

“So does the thought of not seeing James, the thought of him maybe leaving Oxford now that he’s stopped working with you, does that make you feel anxious?”

“You’d feel that too, if one of your best mates was going off…” _And this conversation isn’t helping,_ he wants to say, but he can’t quite get the words out at her.

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d feel sad, no doubt. Gutted, with some of them. But it happens. Has happened. I wouldn’t feel anxious. Or disturbed. Or as if my world is getting thrown off-balance and I need to do something to stop it happening. I wouldn’t feel the way you’re feeling now at having to face the thought of James leaving.”

There’s a tightness in his chest now that doesn’t seem to be easing as she keeps talking, bringing things home to him. So it’s a relief that she’s stopped now and he can focus out her window, at the late still-bright summer evening. That drizzle has cleared, the drizzle that had somehow sent them inside the pub, sitting on benches instead of seats, precipitating this whole conversation that’s somehow, even though it’s just words, just Laura’s opinions really, making everything within him just—

“James leaving for good,” Laura’s voice adds.

And that’s enough. He moves to get up, his instinct telling him to just go now, and only the tug on his arm stops him, keeping him seated beside her.

“Robbie.” And her voice is nothing but kind now, in response to how he must look, which somehow just makes him feel all the worse. “I’m _not_ trying to upset you. Just—give in to it, why don’t you? Let yourself see what’s going on here. It’ll be a lot easier for all of us.”

He can’t look at her. She’s somehow making concrete all the vaguely formed thoughts and feelings that might occasionally surface, but he keeps firmly pushed down under the practicalities he knows of himself. It takes a couple of attempts to get the words out, and they don’t even make much sense to him.

“What if I don’t want to lose either of you?” he asks, and it’s rather wrenched out of him.

“You mean you don’t want to hurt either of us. That’s what you mean. And James expects nothing more from you than your friendship, so it doesn’t hurt anyone just to leave things like this. Well, this hurts, Robbie. It’ll hurt me if we go on the way it is right now. I’m not prepared to keep going like this, when you’re just fooling yourself there’s no decision to make and I’ll be the one left feeling—”

“Feeling what?” he asks because he's starting just to get an inkling, a horrible feeling that—well, just how has he been making her feel?

“Feeling like I might not really be your first choice if James wasn’t a man,” she says, frowning as she tries to sum it up. “Or if you could lift the mental block you’ve got about seeing what’s going on here, just because he is a bloke.”

He can’t really come up with anything to say now, however much he might want to.

“I think you’re always focused on James and you’re so used to having him right there, you’ve never even had to acknowledge it to yourself. And there’s no point, Robbie, two people trying to make a proper go of a relationship if one of us is caught up in unresolved feelings for someone else. There’s just no _point_. It’s like Franco said—” She stops abruptly, frowning.

“What was that?” Robbie is automatically pulled back to her, more by the sudden halt than her words.

“Someone else said that to me—okay, Robbie, that’s pretty much what Franco said when he was over last time.”

“Franco? When was he over?” Although, the absurdity of him playing any sort of jealousy card here, given the conversation they’re having, is really not lost on him.

“You know when I last saw him, it was back when he was over and James saw us having dinner.”

“And why’d he say that to you then? About—unresolved feelings?”

“Ironically, as it turns out, he said it about you. I think he would’ve taken that transfer back here at the time, his firm did offer in the end, if he’d felt that he and I—anyway, that wasn’t a commitment I was willing to make. He could see I was unsure and he thought I had unfinished business with you. He wasn’t far off the mark, I suppose,” she says ruefully. “James’s unexpected arrival did rather change the direction of the evening. And in explaining away why he was looking at us like _that_ and why I was so taken aback to see him, I landed up explaining about the state of my relationship with you. Or trying to,” she adds, with a slight grimace that would probably have been amusement under different circumstances.

 _Look, I hope that you and Dr Hobson work it out,_ says a quiet voice in Robbie’s head. James, unwillingly finding himself right in the middle of that whole episode. _Whatever it is. Which you’ve got to admit is a bit of a mystery._

Robbie’s head is reeling at this point. He needs to be able to think—and he seizes on a chance here to talk about something else, to buy a bit of time. “What’s ironic about all that?”

“It’s ironic,” Laura says, shortly, “because I’m now getting far more insight than I ever wanted into exactly how Franco felt.”

Oh. “And why’d the two of you break up in the first place, then, all those years ago, anyway?” Robbie enquires, still in his best interested, conversational tone.

“Because I didn’t want to do the long distance thing when he went back to Germany— _no_ , Robbie.” It works on some suspects in the interrogation room, that tone of voice. It puts them at ease, lulling them into starting to talk about seemingly innocuous subjects. It doesn’t work to distract Laura Hobson. Had been worth a try, though.

James would hate this. He would really hate this. He’d be thoroughly alarmed to think they were having this sort of argument with him at the centre and, Christ, if he had a clue what Laura actually thinks—he’d just hate it. Having his feelings about Robbie discussed like this. It’s not something he’d ever bring to the forefront of anyone’s attention. Not even Robbie’s.

James is just always there, isn’t he, sparking off you with his humour and that enjoyable intelligence of his, but then dropping the gentle mockery whenever he sees there might be a need, and simply giving what help he can—even if it’s just talking you through trying to cook dinner for the woman you’ve just started to go out with. He’s just always there watching in the way that he does, drawing closer, almost guarding you over the years, and then stepping in with a sudden sharpness if anyone says or does something he thinks would upset you. Just there trying to offer practical kindness if your back goes or you’re not sleeping well, just always ready to support and try and ease your day and never expecting anything more—

And then it suddenly occurs to Robbie, the thought making him still, that in all of this what it’s never occurred to him to deny is that James might have feelings for him that go beyond friendship. But of course James doesn’t. If Robbie thinks about it, if he could order his thoughts, he’ll find some evidence, some convincing reason that James doesn’t think of him that way.

It feels like trying to twist the facts of a case to fit a theory that he wants to be true. It’s not working.

He finds himself properly on his feet now, looking down at Laura. She doesn’t try to stop him this time.

“I’ll walk down to the taxi rank,” he offers. “I just need to—”

“Yeah. I’d need some thinking time myself if I were you after all that,” she says with a sigh. “Just—God, Robbie, there may be the odd moment when I’ll live to regret saying all that and I’ve certainly felt it wasn’t my business before, but—well, it became my business, didn’t it? And it feels bloody good to me just to get that off my chest. I can only suppress things for so long.” That’s certainly true, he knows.

“I—might take a few days off,” he finds himself saying. “Go away. But I’ll call you first—”

The look she gives him as she rises to let him out is one that he’s gone beyond being able to decipher.

 

=======================================================================

 

_Won’t be moving the furniture today. Thanks, though. Heading away for a few days._

Robbie has only just remembered about that plan in time to send the text—before James presumably sets off to come over here to Robbie’s flat. It’s not surprising his mind isn’t really functioning at its best this morning, though, considering the night he’s just endured.

He’d finally fallen into a deep but thoroughly unrefreshing sleep, only to be woken by the bright sunlight, putting paid to his hopes of achieving temporary oblivion from his thoughts. And this morning he’s certainly not been getting any further with those thoughts about what to do here.

Then he’d suddenly realised that he had a genuine need, a real reason to contact James, and he’d felt pure relief. Because he now feels almost guilty texting James behind Laura’s back, it feels like. And somehow, in the midst of all this confusion and guilt, what he wants, he really just wants, is that familiar, reassuring, steadying connection with James—

His phone buzzes.

 _You okay?_ James’s text just goes straight to the heart of the matter, for him. Concern for Robbie’s welfare.

No. I’m gone far past okay. _Just taking a few days,_ he types. Does that read casually enough?

_Is something wrong in Manchester?_

And James knows, of course, about that recent scare with Robbie’s grandson, his hospital stay, so Robbie’s reply is hurried in his urge to reassure. _They’re fine, James. Laura and I just need a few days separately. A bit of space._

 _Sorry._ It’s instant. He seems to get the text right as soon as he presses send himself. And, rationally, he knows that James isn’t apologising. He’s just expressing sympathy, his ready warm sympathy, much as he will if Robbie and Laura do break up. But it sounds like an apology from James because of all that’s been said.

Oh, Christ. He can’t leave it like that.

 _It’s all right,_ he sends back. It’s all right, lad. None of this is your fault. Because he still can’t get past that feeling that James, if he’d been privy to any extract from that conversation last night, would be horrified at this.

_If you want to go for a pint first?_

He’d love to. Just to see James after the shocks of last night. It’s almost a reflex just to check in with him, like they do at the end of a rough case, without actually saying much. James’s company has always been a balm, a way to rebalance after something that’s shaken them or a stressful week. He knows that today James will just let him sit in undemanding silence if he wants, or will amuse and distract him if he thinks Robbie wants that, he’ll do whatever he thinks Robbie needs.

And he’d never have brought all this up, would he? They could have gone on for years like that. He’d take what was offered, be his own apparently self-contained self and never quite expect anything more from Robbie. And it’s not fair to James to do that. At least Robbie knows that now. He just doesn’t know where it leaves him with either James or Laura and this position he’s somehow put himself in.

He’s sitting here with the phone in his hand and James’s friendly offer is going unanswered.

_Thanks. Not today. Later in the week, yeah?_

There’s the shortest of pauses and then: _You know where I am,_ Robbie’s screen informs him agreeably.

And that’s also James. All this pulling back and protecting himself that Robbie now has to acknowledge James has indeed been trying to do, but still, he sees Robbie in need and he reaches straight past that to try and support him. He puts Robbie first. The way he always just—oh, how could he have been so bloody _clueless?_ He knows James and he should have seen this for himself. Should’ve kept a better eye on that closeness instead of just enjoying it. And what’s he done to James already, anyway, kissing Laura right in front of him when he’d come back from Kosovo, practically summoned by Robbie, as some strange way to announce their new relationship to him…

Robbie can’t actually take this. He’s not going anywhere to let all this go round his head for days by himself. He’s not good at that. He picks up the phone and goes to his most-used contacts list. It rings only briefly before it’s answered and there’s a silence on the other end. He takes a breath. “Laura?”

“Hi.” And she sounds a bit—relieved.

===

She looks better this morning, is Robbie’s first, relieved thought. She actually looks like she’s slept all right. She seems to be in a rather matter-of-fact mood, as she leads him straight through to her sunny conservatory. Rueful but, well, not exactly all that upset.

And it doesn’t take too long to realise, once he has a welcome coffee in front of him, that that’s because she’s made up her mind already. Well, of course she has, he thinks, impatient at his own stupidity now, what was she going to do, after his reactions last night, wait for him to make his choice? But there’s a warm, welcome breeze making its way in through the open glass doors to her garden, and it does somehow all seem that bit better now that he’s here with her instead of trying to think it through himself.

“At least we did give it a try, Robbie,” she offers after a long moment when they’ve both just focused on their coffee.

They are actually doing this, aren’t they? “I—”

“You know what I said about James is true, and you’re feeling guilty now. Which you can’t take, can you? That’s why you’ve come to talk to me instead of going away.”

His guilt at his own behaviour must be written all over his face. Lord, this would be easier if she wasn’t so bloody sharp, so quick up on the uptake. He kind of needs this whole thing to move at a slower pace.

“Which _I_ certainly prefer, Robbie—not to drag this out now—I should’ve known you’d try to buy some time, though. I know you hate hurting people. I know you’ll do a lot to avoid it. Takes you to get into a right temper before you’ll even say anything hurtful to someone you care about.”

“Don’t know if that’s so true, I’ve been known to put my foot in it—” _Just a bit. James could tell you…_

“Yeah. I mean intentionally, though, not through pure and utter—” She grins at him now “—lack of tact.” She does know him too well, and it makes this painful. There’s still that flare of anxiety over risking losing her. She’s continuing, though, pragmatic enough but with something in her voice that tells him her mind is more than made up. “You’re not devastating me, you know. I suppose it was a trial period, really. We tried and it hasn’t worked.”

“Like me mattress,” Robbie mutters to himself.

“What?” she asks, rather blankly.

“My orthopaedic mattress. That’s what it said when I got it. James found this site online when I hurt my back and you order one and they say if you’re not fully satisfied after ninety days you can return it.” _Return me, I suppose, to me ex-sergeant who still hasn’t got a flaming clue what’s gone on this weekend but bloody hell if it was true what they say about people’s ears burning then he’d be in danger of spontaneous combustion._

“Well, we don’t appear to have reached the ninety days mark. But, Robbie, for the record, the problem really wasn’t your mattress,” she says, gravely. And he can’t quite be right about this, surely, but she looks like she’s straightening her lips at him now almost as if she’s trying not to laugh.

It’s funny how fast referring to your sex life with someone can become embarrassing when you know it won’t happen with them again. And it had been nice. Not madly passionate, but he’s no spring chicken and it had been warmly nice to have someone in his bed again. _Good strange._ Someone he cares a lot about. He feels a sudden pang of loss at that.

“But don’t you want—well, more than that, Robbie? What we’ve had so far? I think we could just find ourselves sliding back into the pattern of friends—with intimacy but still more like friends—rather than true partners, really, if we’d gone much further with this.”

She obviously does. Want more. And she’s worked out that he hasn’t got room to give her more, because of his pull towards James.

“Made a right pig’s ear of this, haven’t I?”

“Well—” She narrows her eyes at him. She _is_ slightly amused now. Bloody hell. It makes him open his mouth and blurt out one uncensored thought that had surfaced at an ungodly hour of the night he’s just endured.

“I could, you know. Care for you both like that?”

“Robbie—no.” But her face creases into a grin. “You knew that was a long shot.”

“Worth a try.”

She’s genuinely entertained, which is a relief to see. It gives him hope that somehow they will recover from this. That she’s genuine when she says that she’ll be all right. “And what would you have done if I’d said yes?” she enquires.

“Dunno. You care about James. You find him attractive.” _Dishy._ Actually, Robbie has no idea what he’d have done if she’d said yes to that, but he gets the feeling that it’d have involved backpedalling very fast indeed.

“You can get rid of that little notion, for a start. But maybe you and I had to play this thing out, you know, after all those years, see if our friendship could become more, or we’d always have wondered—well, I would. So I suppose—well, now we have given it a go, it must free me up a bit as well,” she says, sounding surprised. “If we’d kept going I think it would be much harder to recover ourselves, though. So it’s best we stop now.”

“I’m sorry, you know, for—” He doesn’t get very far. She’s frowning already, to bring him to a halt, not much liking what he’s saying, it seems.

“Being oblivious isn’t the worst crime in the world. And I could have left you in blissful ignorance and not pushed this.” No, she couldn’t, he knows, even if she thinks she could. “And kindly don’t think I did this for any noble reasons. I have _no_ desire to be in a relationship where I feel like I’m second best.”

“Still—” he says rather helplessly. But he doesn’t even know if he’s just trying to alleviate his own feelings now.

“We’ll work it out, Robbie, we won’t lose sight of each other. I mean, besides anything else, we’re still both on call over this weekend. At least—I thought you were?”

Christ, he’d completely and utterly forgotten that. He’d been planning to go away and it had never even entered his mind that he’s on call. He has a sudden vision of trying to explain that one to Innocent— _Sorry, ma’am, I’d gone away for the weekend. You’ll vividly remember ex-Sergeant Hathaway who just resigned. Laura made me see I have all these feelings for him and it sort of drove the on-call rota straight out of me head._

“So even if we were minded to avoid each other while the dust settles, Robbie, there’ll always be the corpses.”

“You’re all heart,” he informs her.

She’s completely unrepentant. “And—Robbie, what are you going to do?”

He looks at her in surprise and he gets the distinct feeling that she’s not encouraging him, as such, she’s actually intensely curious at the mere thought that he might go to James and—but it feels sort of disrespectful, disloyal to her to even think of that just now.

Never mind that it seems rather arrogant to assume that James, after all this, after Robbie taking up with Laura, would still even want to—the long night that Robbie’s just spent facing up to everything, confronted with exactly how his own obliviousness might have made both Laura and James feel, has rather knocked any confidence out of him. “I don’t even know if he’d actually want to now, when all’s said and done,” he tries dissembling.

Laura just delivers a very familiar eye-roll to him for his pains. It gives him another reassuring semblance of normality at long last. “Oh, somehow, I don’t think _that_ part will be a problem,” she says.

 

Part II  
_A Friday evening in August. James Hathaway’s Flat._

 

James lets his head fall back on the top of his own couch. It’s almost like old times, this evening—having Robbie back in his flat on a Friday, after a pint at the Trout. A takeaway has been indulged in and cleared away, and there’s a cold beer in front of each of them.

The only real difference is that James no longer has a case to decompress from, no recent horrors to try and clear from his head. Robbie’s undemanding presence after a rough week used to somehow defuse the power of the worst of those cases in the aftermath. James used to let himself slowly fall into the quieter rhythm of speech and silences with Robbie, over a pint, and let that loosen the grip that some of those mental images used to take on his unforgiving mind.

Is Robbie himself struggling after a case now, though? He’d said it’d been quiet enough the past while in work, but something is certainly preoccupying him this evening. He keeps sending glances James’s way, watching James more than the television, it feels like. He’s only smiling absently the odd time at James’s lightly mocking commentary on the quiz show, too. Well, he’s been distracted any time James has seen him recently, but James had assumed, of course, that that was to do with Laura, that Robbie’s recovery from their break-up would take time.

That break-up had seemed to come rather out of the blue, and although Robbie had said he was fine about it he’d also seemed thoroughly uncomfortable when James had tried to express his awkward sympathy. Hadn’t wanted to go into any detail, obviously. It certainly all seemed rather final. If slightly—odd.

It’s a worry, Robbie really not being himself, now that James is properly looking further afield at more far-flung universities. Now that James’s application has been submitted and he’s no longer immersed in the content of his proposal, he’s had to return to the unwelcome real-life practicalities of what to do if he isn’t accepted. And while he’s facing facts, he has to acknowledge to himself that moving away from Oxford and finally letting Robbie Lewis assume his proper proportions in James’s wayward head—friend, former governor, erstwhile partner in James’s so-recently concluded CID days, those are the proportions Robbie should assume—it might be the best way to move forward with his life now. Might, perhaps, be almost a relief to make the break completely. Because surely a bit of physical distance can only help in that attempt?

His plans to leave are gradually crystallising into something like a resolution now. Which means he can allow himself to see more of Robbie again even without the old structure of the job, a final indulgence before this sort of contact presumably fades into something like a long-distance friendship. Well, Robbie certainly seems to be seeking James’s company just recently and it would be hard to deny him that when he’s obviously still struggling a bit.

James will know soon enough, anyway. Whether the fates are going to give him a firm helping hand and turn him away from Oxford.

And then Robbie, still doing that rather uncanny thing of somehow fixing on what’s running through James’s mind at a given moment, turns his head properly to look at James directly at last. “You’ll be hearing about your course soon, won’t you? You’ll hear if you got it?”

“Yeah.”

“And if you don’t get accepted…”

James is rather surprised. Last time this had really come up for discussion, Robbie had stuck firmly to the stance he’d adopted all along. That it was some sort of foregone conclusion. James can remember that last conversation. He’d been explaining about this course to Laura, in the pub, back right before she and Robbie split up, and referring to his vague plans for other applications in other universities, other cities. Robbie had proved immune to any suggestion that James might not get accepted to his own first choice. His rather gruff, stalwart loyalty— _‘course, they’ll snap you up, they’d be fools not to_ —had been both endearing and slightly exasperating to James, who knows full well that acceptance criteria really don’t work like that. Laura had obviously known that too, judging from the slightly narrowed-eyed look he’d caught her giving Robbie once or twice that evening, in all of his loyal idealism.

“Well, I don’t think it’s that likely I’ll get it, really,” he tells Robbie now. And he finds it a further relief to voice what’s in his head. Once he’d actually submitted the application and was no longer caught up in his own ideas, doubts had certainly begun to plague him. He is, after all, competing against applications from other candidates who have far more up-to-date knowledge, who haven’t taken such an extended break from this field of study or made quite such a detour away from theology as James had. “And I can’t wait around in Oxford to apply for the next intake round—“ It’d seemed a wonder that the research masters he wanted had been one of the graduate courses that had stayed open after the standard March deadline, because of places left to fill. James is not under any illusions that that means his own application will succeed.

But he stops, entirely, losing track of his thoughts because Robbie has gone a little pale under that summer tan of his—and James, becoming alarmed, straightens up a bit and waits, gazing at him, to see if he’s about to reveal at last, in his own fashion, whatever’s been troubling him. Is he _ill,_ is that it, has he had some sort of bad news?

But Robbie says gruffly; “This mightn’t be fair of me to ask—only you’ll know that but—what if you didn’t go, what if you stayed and—”

James doesn’t even process the words for a moment, so different are they from what he’d feared he was about to hear. He can feel himself gazing at Robbie in pure confusion. And Robbie stops, his hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck in a sure tell of turmoil that pulls at James, who’s seen that familiar gesture so many times.

“It’s all right,” James offers, rather idiotically—because he has no idea if it is, after all—but he can never take seeing Robbie in any sort of distress, so he reaches up, just to still those rubbing fingers, to place his hand over Robbie’s on the back of Robbie’s neck. He presses Robbie’s hand lightly, briefly, under his own but Robbie stills completely under this new touch and is looking at him in a way that—No, no, surely not—

And James Hathaway, sitting on his couch in his flat on a sunny Friday evening and in a state of complete and utter disbelief, finds himself being kissed by Robbie Lewis. It’s fairly tentative at first, fairly chaste closed-mouth kisses, but kisses that have a certain urgency to them. For all their light uncertainty, they seem to be laying a claim. And James, his mind freewheeling away from any attempt to make sense of this new reality, simply gives in and lets himself kiss back with all the impossible longing that he’s felt for this. He feels Robbie’s hands moving on his shoulders, against his neck, even, briefly, a gentle caress at the side of his face that seems to be communicating that he’s somehow to be protected, and the only sensation left then is of Robbie. Robbie’s own scent and warmth so familiar after all those years that James spent learning at his shoulder, but overwhelming James now.

When they stop, when Robbie withdraws, but not far at all, James lands up buried in Robbie’s chest, his forehead pressing against the warm solidity of it, and a hand comes to rest on top of his head. And Robbie has him held very firmly with his other arm, against him now.

“Not much good with words, as you know,” Robbie says. And his voice is a little hoarse, but that sounds just right to James, because James has a rather ridiculous lump in his own throat. “But that’s what I wanted to say.”

 

Part III  
_A late night in early October. Robbie Lewis’s bed._

 

James privately thinks that the autumn chill rather has its advantages. It gives all sorts of excuses for moving closer in the name of seeking extra warmth—landing his stockinged feet into Robbie’s lap on the couch early in the evening, when the gathering darkness has already made a safe cocoon of Robbie’s flat, or gravitating towards Robbie late at night, like this, settling the duvet around them both, as soon as the bedside lamps go off. He still finds it hard to credit that he doesn’t actually need excuses at all.

Because Robbie casually, but wholeheartedly, simply accommodates any advances made and just returns them with interest. He tucks his arm under and around James now as James settles himself in his accustomed place, rolling over to tuck a head onto Robbie’s shoulder. James will roll away to go to sleep, usually, but often find himself back where he started early next morning. Or sometimes spread-eagled with a limb or two draped comfortably over Robbie. James’s body seems far more comfortable, far more inclined to make itself at home, in this particular bed than it’s ever been in a sleeping space before.

Things have begun to settle into an everyday rhythm, built around James’s course and Robbie’s work and the shape of this new relationship that’s becoming a joyous permanent entity rather than an incredulous new idea.

And James is almost asleep, drowsily warm, when—“Phone,” mutters Robbie suddenly and James frowns, listening, before he realises what Robbie means, that he’s left his mobile in the living room.

“I’ll go,” James offers guilelessly and is up out of the bed, eluding Robbie’s belated grasp.

“If you think I’m falling for that one again,” comes an indignant voice after James as he makes his rapid way to grab the phone from the coffee table. He doesn’t really need the lights on any more, he realises with pleasure. He just knows the contours of Robbie’s living space well enough now in the almost-dark. The street-lamps’ glow penetrating the thinner living-room curtains serves him well enough to find the phone. James casts a grin at that couch he sometimes used to sleep on himself and then straightens his expression before he returns to Robbie, needing to maintain a semblance of gravity despite the concealing darkness. Because last time this had happened the bloody phone had been hiding in the kitchen and taken a while to locate. So he’d shoved the cold soles of his tile-exposed feet against Robbie’s calves when he returned to bed.

“How d’you reckon they’d have roused you if there was a call-out?” James enquires once he’s resumed his position and kindly tucked his feet back from a still-suspicious Robbie. “Sent Julie around to bang on your door?” Because no-one at the station quite knows yet about Robbie and his ex-sergeant. James doesn’t mind, James has thoroughly enjoyed the private intensity of the past weeks.

“I reckon if Laura was kept waiting at a scene she’d have no qualms at all about dialling your phone, regardless of the hour, pulling you from your sleep to get you to send me on me way.” Well, true, one person knows, of course.

James hmms, amused at the idea. “As revenge,” he suggests, facetiously, “for stealing her man.”

Robbie's thumb, which has been stroking the back of James’s neck, pauses for a moment. “Never meant to put either of you through that.”

“You didn’t put me through anything,” James assures him, surprised. It takes a moment before the phrasing of that, the lack of any amusement at his own ridiculous remark and Robbie’s rueful tone, suddenly collide in suspicion in his mind. “What d’you mean—either of us?”

And Robbie stills, his body tightening slightly under James as he obviously comes fully alert. Then he reaches out and clicks on his bedside lamp, causing James’s head to roll off his shoulder. Robbie is looking down at him now, looking both resigned and rather—unhappy. James feels another flare of concern from this reaction to his question.

“Look,” Robbie starts, “Told myself I’d tell you now, first time you asked. Or when it came up again. Laura and I—” and he stops. But the gruffness in his voice turns that flare into a full blown qualm of foreboding. James’s mind is already racing ahead here as he shuffles back onto his own pillow, into a more upright position.

“Why _did_ you and Laura break up?”

“She worked out I had feelings for you. And she wasn’t prepared to put up with it. Quite right too.” Robbie is looking at him, rather chagrined, but part of James, despite the shock of what he’s hearing, the words he’s trying to make sense of, still processes a note of anxiety in Robbie’s voice.

“That’s why you broke up?”

“Well, wasn’t much point continuing after that, was there? She called a halt to it but even if she hadn’t—”

“But—”

“It’s all right, James. Who knows if we’d have worked out anyway—I think she saw that if you left altogether I’d be—well, it wouldn’t have worked, I wouldn’t have had much left to give her.”

“So she figured out how you felt before you did?”

“Aye, well. She’s like that. Not like she put ideas in my head, mind, she more—pulled them out of it. And she’s okay with this, lad, she is. She says, well, she thinks it’d be a waste if we didn’t.”

“Did she _know?_ ”

“Know what?” asks Robbie, frowning, his instant wariness rather spoiling the effect of the matter-of-fact reassurance he’s so obviously trying to offer.

Oh _fuck_ , she _did._ _She thinks it’d be a waste if we didn’t._ So she’d known that Robbie’s feelings for James were very much reciprocated. The instinctively panicked feeling of exposure after all those years of hiding rises up automatically in James. He actually has to remind himself that at least it’s all right if Robbie knows now.

“When did she say that—” But it’s starting to fall into place in his mind like the sudden rapid build at the end of a previously baffling case. Robbie had suddenly texted that he was going away, that he and Laura were taking a few days apart—although then he didn’t go anywhere—and next time he saw James, he’d said his relationship with Laura was over. And that sudden text exchange, that had been the morning after that evening in the pub together—so they'd argued over Robbie’s feelings for James after that evening when James had thought that everything was okay, he’d thought he’d done such a good job trying to relax with both of them.

“She saw that I wanted you,” James says with difficulty. “She saw me wanting that when she was in a relationship with you—” How awful for her. And he’d tried so fucking hard to pull back, but she must have known anyway.

“Well—wasn’t like that,” Robbie sounds slightly helpless. James looks at him. They’re both sitting up by now. “Look, when she makes up her mind—James, I was informed rather sharpish, when she picked up that I was still holding back, that if I thought I was doing her any favours delaying on telling you how I felt, through some misguided sense of guilt or loyalty, then she’d like to disabuse me of that misguided notion. And she did—pretty bloody thoroughly.” He’s grinning at James a bit now. James doesn’t find it funny.

Robbie sighs. Then he slides down on his pillow and extends an arm in invitation. James moves closer again and lets himself slide down on his back too, shifting to allow that arm to hold him, but his mind isn’t pacified. “Knew you’d be upset over this,” Robbie is still eyeing him. “Come on now, though, you can see there’s nothing for you to feel bad over?”

And lying here, looking at him, James can see the guilt under all of Robbie’s efforts here. Well, Robbie wouldn’t have hurt Laura intentionally, would he, not for the world. He’d just obviously hurt her by choosing James, regardless of his reassurances. More than he’s admitting, or otherwise why this guilt? Because James certainly knows guilt. He knows the full paralysing, corrosive hold of it. And he also knows that he can’t let Robbie feel it on his behalf.

He automatically, almost involuntarily, reaches to comfort, rolling over onto Robbie again, finding a place for his head on Robbie’s strong chest. Robbie obviously takes that as a sign that James finally agrees, that he’s accepted the reassurance that things really are all right, because he reaches to turn off that lamp, the small click and sudden restoration of darkness bookending the conversation that has rather shattered the evening. James thinks he can also discern relief in Robbie’s haste to conclude this discussion that he very obviously hadn’t wanted to have in the first place. But Robbie is drawing him in closer now in the dark, his arm holding James firmly as if he almost doesn’t intend to let him go tonight.

It reminds James of how firmly he’d been held that first evening back in August when he’d been preparing to pull away from Robbie at last, and then found himself held and kissed and claimed instead. And he badly wants to focus on that security right now, the comfort of it, rather than these feelings of gathering unease about his part in all this. Here at this moment, in Robbie's bed, safe and held like this amidst all the wonder of this new relationship, this new reality it’s often felt like recently to James, it’s almost possible to believe Robbie’s stance that this really is all right. That it won’t be a problem. Almost. Or at least that it’s not something that has to be dealt with right at this moment. So eventually James lets his own disquiet be quelled for now, lets himself be overwhelmed by the peaceful warmth and solid reassurance of Robbie, and he drifts off to sleep.

 

Part IV  
_The very early hours of a Monday morning in February. John Radcliffe Hospital._

 

The florescent lights are making the linoleum-tiled floor far too bright in patches. In other places, it’s scuffed far beyond the restorative abilities of that floor polishing machine that keeps humming past. Scuffed from other people’s restlessly moving feet as they’ve sat here over the years, unable to still their own anxieties. James finds that he’s able to sit without moving, though. If he just stares at a patch of the floor, with its patina of light, hard enough, and doesn’t let it slip out of focus, if he keeps that in front of his eyes, then he can hold back that other vivid mental image that keeps threatening to overwhelm him.

It’s the aroma of coffee that finally rouses him from his stupor, and he turns his head enough to see a cardboard cup arriving on the empty seat beside him, and a hand withdrawing. It’s a familiar hand somehow, one that he’s seen in motion a lot—“James?”

“ _Oh._ Can you—”

And Laura, looking down at him in pure concern, gets it immediately. “Yes. Of course. They’re not telling you much, is that it? Hold on.” And she’s heading for the nurses’ desk, already in full professional mode. He can recognise that even through his confusion at her suddenly materialising here. He straightens up properly, and watches after her intently to gauge her reactions to what they’ll tell her. He’s standing by the time she makes her way back to him but she sits down and waits, tilting her head and an enquiring eyebrow at him and he reluctantly settles back down again, back in this unmercifully hard plastic seat, but with her beside him now.

“It’s not too bad, honestly, James. It’s just observations they’re keeping him in for. They’ve looked at the x-rays and his ribs aren’t broken. They don’t think the whiplash is too bad either. But it’s a precaution. Because he can’t recall the moment of the accident, that’s their concern. So he’s had a scan just in case it was any sort of neurological event that caused him to briefly lose consciousness, caused him to lose control, and it does look fine. It was probably the impact from the collision itself that caused a slight concussion, and that’s why he can’t quite recall it. So it’s just that they need to do overnight observations now, that’s what’s prompted his admission.”

“That’s what they told me—but it’s just easier to believe that he’s really all right, coming from you,” he explains in relief. She’s looking at him, warmly, rather struck by that, it seems. And it sinks in that—“I should have rung you, I would have rung you if I’d been thinking straight—not just for you to get information, I don’t mean—”

“I hope you know you can, either of you, any time.” She’s stressed the _either of you_ part. He’s not sure, at the moment, why she’s doing that, so he tries to explain his omission further, because, God, of course she’d want to know if Robbie is hurt. But what comes out of his mouth is somehow a wholly different aspect to this. “Robbie would’ve if he’d been the one sitting here—” But it’s equally true. Robbie would have reached for his phone, without a second thought, and called her. If the positions were reversed and it was James in there and he’d felt the need for support. If they wouldn’t let him in until the morning.

“I know,” Laura is saying. “And you would’ve thought of it eventually too. Wouldn’t you? But luckily there are people ahead of you here.”

“How _did_ you know?”

“A certain Detective Sergeant Lockhart is obviously pulling a pretty late night tonight.” Oh, _Julie._ “I think something broke in a case. She said she’s with Grainger while Robbie’s on leave? Anyway, someone in Traffic must have told her that the two of you were involved. She called me. So what actually happened? How did you both land up in a single-vehicle RTA, as she put it?”

“Landed up in a ditch, more like,” mutters James. “And I don’t know what happened.”

“You don’t remember?” She’s looking at him sharply now. Then she does that thing he remembers from back in his days in the station where she narrows her eyes a bit and starts to focus on his face even harder. “And how come _you_ can’t tell them whether Robbie lost consciousness, anyway? Or fell asleep? You must have—”

From someone else, that could feel like blame. But from the way she’s looking at him, he knows where her concern lies. “No, _I_ was asleep. I didn’t lose consciousness, I’m not concussed, I’m not really hurt, I was just asleep.”

She’s still looking rather hard at him. And, fuck, she’s going to try persuading him to go home, that she’ll drop him home and he should get some rest and come back in the morning. He’s well aware that that would be the reasonable thing to do and she’s eminently practical. She’s been incredibly kind already, coming down here at this hour of the night, and it’s not an emergency, she’s aware of that by now. It must just seem like he’s being anxious, really. He feels a rising dismay that he’ll have to argue with her. He doesn’t, somehow, have the energy for it. But he also finds that he suddenly minds, he really minds, that he’s going to make things awkward when he refuses her, that he’s going to cause the warmth of her support so far to dissipate because this will understandably frustrate her.

He can’t, right at this moment, after the sudden relief and comfort of her presence, face the prospect of things descending back into that awful feeling of awkwardness that he can’t get past with her ever since Robbie had told him what had actually happened between him and Laura—and now it’ll just seem like he’s being stubborn and obtuse. It would hardly be unlike him. He must have seemed to Laura over the past few months to be horribly aloof, and he really isn’t in much of a state to handle this well. Not that he can handle it at the best of times. And the upshot of it is that she’ll surely depart, in the end, as most sensible people would, and leave him here alone again to battle against the long reach of those unrelenting images. He waits, resigned, for her to start her persuasion, for her opening shot.

“You’ll want some more coffee, James. You haven’t touched that one. I’ll get you a hot one.”

Oh. Well, somehow he seems to have bought a bit more time here. And a hot drink would be welcome, actually. He is a bit cold, despite his coat and the overheated hospital. Better not to say. The unpalatable stuff the vending machine will dispense should at least have a warming effect.

At some stage during each of those long nights here with Robbie, on the job, back in his Sergeant Hathaway days, he would generally reach a tipping point where the desire for something vaguely resembling a coffee overrode his reluctance to sample the stuff from these machines. There had always been the foolishly-enduring hope that it couldn’t possibly be as bad, as weak and tasteless, as the previous time. He watches Laura vaguely now as he remembers one night, which could have been one of so many, waiting for the go-ahead to question the survivor of an attack. He’d offered a cardboard cup to Robbie; along with an involuntary grimace at the first sip he’d taken from his own cup, unable to suppress his ire this time.

“Coffee, sir? Although I think there’s a case to be made for suing them under the Trade Descriptions Act, using that name for it. You’d need to drink half a dozen cups of this before you got any sort of benefit from it.”

“ _You_ certainly would,” Robbie had informed him with that grin that used to mean that James had said or done something to amuse or exasperate or both in fairly equal measure. And now these days—well, it means much the same, really, but there’s an unsuppressed fondness to it, pure affection in Robbie’s eyes to accompany it, and it seems more directly aimed at James. Whereas it used to be a grin that Robbie gave more to himself. Sometimes, these days, it seems to be unprompted. James, absorbed, doing something as ordinary as sitting on the couch working out some tricky fingering on the guitar, will suddenly raise his head and find himself the recipient of that grin.

He’s still thinking about that, about all the time spent here with Robbie back when they were Lewis and Hathaway, inspector and sergeant, back when Robbie used to be his _sir_ —when a cardboard cup is offered to him. He takes it, with polite thanks, sipping automatically, as Laura sits down beside him again. But it’s strong. And the strength of it makes it taste like actual coffee. He stares at it and then at Laura, who appears to be thoroughly enjoying his reaction, if the look on her face is anything to go by. “What, James? You don’t know how to humour the vending machine?”

“You’re amazing,” he tells her in much more sincere gratitude. He takes another sip just to check—“That would have been a damn useful technique to learn years ago,” he reflects.

“I can imagine,” she informs him rather smugly. “You can override—well, never mind actually,” she says to herself. “Trade secret. Handy one, too. So next time you find yourself or Robbie in here after your various misadventures, you can take one look at that vending machine and you’ll be straight on the phone to me. Won’t you?” She’s looking at him rather searchingly now, though.

“I really will,” he promises, and he doesn’t mean it for the coffee. Ridiculously impressed though he actually is.

But it’s come home to him, sitting here with her in all her rather-missed sympathetic humour and warmth, that the awkwardness these past months—none of it has been due to Laura. All of it has stemmed from his own guilty unease at getting something that felt too good to be true, at what had felt like her expense. However irrational that feeling may be.

The coffee is helping to order his thoughts now, a bit. His mind, still occupied until now, with avoiding processing those pictures from tonight, is finally beginning to take in a little more than his immediate surroundings and his tangled emotions. And something that’s been nudging at the corners of his awareness finally makes it to the forefront. He frowns at Laura—“I thought you were in Germany?”

She looks down at herself and then peers around the waiting room, appearing to take this question quite literally. “Apparently not,” she says gravely. “But you know best, of course.”

She’s being ridiculous purely to cheer him up now. But he feels his lips quirk all the same. At her willingness, if nothing else. And judging from the slight lift of mischief in her expression in response, he must have managed a smile.

“We got back earlier tonight,” she enlightens him. “And Franco is now apparently so accustomed to my phone going at ungodly hours that he barely stirred when I left. Don’t think he took in what I was saying. He’ll think I’m on a callout, actually,” she says to herself, “Which I shouldn’t be tonight. That’ll puzzle him when he’s more alert. Must text him first thing in the morning.”

She’s staying herself. Not just, thankfully, not pressing him to leave or asking why he won’t, but she’s going to stay here with him. The thought fills him with utter relief. “How was Germany?” he asks suddenly.

She looks at him, amused. “It was good, James. And you don’t need to make polite conversation with me if you’re not up to it.”

“No, I want to know.” He does. Robbie had mentioned she’d been slightly ambivalent about this trip before she left, _not a position I really anticipated finding myself in, meeting the family,_ he’d told James she’d said. Although James also knows that she and Franco had planned to travel around a bit as well during their fortnight there, so it wouldn’t have been too intense.

“All right, then.” She probably thinks he’s just seeking the distraction, but she starts to tell him all the same. And it turns out that it does help, actually. He always likes hearing about places he hasn’t been to and Laura, of course, is a good person to ask, with her wry take on events. God, he’s missed that too.

“It can be interesting, though,” she’s confiding now, her gaze rather drawing him out of his thoughts again. “Getting that other perspective on your partner from people who know him so long.”

“What did you find out?” James asks, alerted by her tone.

She gives him a quick grin. “I went for a drink one night with Franco’s sister—her husband works away a lot so we left Franco babysitting his nieces. And once she’d had a couple of gin and tonics, I learnt that, to Franco, I was _the one that got away_ all those years between our first relationship—and now.”

She delivers the well-worn phrase in rather ironic tones that don’t fool James because he uses that same mechanism himself for truths that rather matter. “And you didn’t know that?” he asks. God, he has been a fool, hasn’t he? It actually sort of does her own happiness with Franco now a disservice, doesn’t it, he thinks confusedly, for James to still be so unable to get past what had happened with her and Robbie.

“No, he wouldn’t ever quite have volunteered that information to me, I don’t think,” she says, considering. “Wouldn’t have actually put it into words. Men.”

“Men,” James agrees.

“And have you been visiting the family yourself?” she asks, in ultra-polite tones, deadpan. He grins at her, suddenly enjoying the complicity. Because spending a week helping to mind a highly energetic small boy is not a position James ever anticipated finding himself in either. But he certainly wasn’t about to let Robbie tire himself out, taking his leave and then looking after his utterly endearing but thoroughly exhausting grandson alone. Lyn had sounded rather desperate when he took her call at home, before he’d even passed her over to Robbie and garnered from Robbie’s reactions what she was ringing about.

And it means rather a lot to him that both Robbie and Lyn had simply taken it for granted that if his research permitted he would come up to Manchester too. It still takes James aback, this easy acceptance the Lewises have of what family members willingly do for each other. It still takes him aback that he’s a member of someone’s family.

“Lyn’s childminder is away,” he explains. “And then Tim’s mum fell ill—she’s okay now—but he wanted to go down to his parents’ place in Cornwall. And Lyn had a training course all week at work—giving it, not taking it—so—”

“Combination of circumstances, really,” Laura acknowledges. “Well, Robbie was due leave. And you were all right to take time off from your research? Robbie says you’ve been going at it fairly hard.”

He feels another pang at guilt at that. _Robbie says._ Because he could have managed to join them now when Robbie meets her. His schedule isn’t exactly inflexible. It had just become the pattern that since Laura and Robbie worked together, in the months after their break-up, they had continued to link in with each other sometimes over coffee or lunch or an after-work drink. Well, or over post-mortem results, come to think of it.

And James, preceding Robbie out of the force, and no longer part of that pattern, had simply ceased to see Laura much.

He doesn’t really avoid her, as such, not at all, he tells himself firmly. He just—he’s let Robbie catch up with her, respected their friendship of years and the priority that that should take, restoring that—but he’s beginning to pick up that that unwillingness to intrude, it’s not just unnecessary now, it’s perhaps not been quite fair to Laura. And to his own friendship with her. And he hasn’t, in all his discomfort, been giving that enough weight.

It had been such a relief, initially, to think that she and Robbie were re-establishing their friendship, with an ease that James privately rather still wonders at. That that hadn’t been wrecked by the mess that had somehow been created when she and Robbie had tried to be together. A mess that James, without actually knowing about it, had been at the centre of.

And it had been a relief at first that he hadn’t had to face her much himself. He had felt so exposed to realise how she must have seen his feelings for Robbie for—well, God knows how long—but then, worst of all, that she’d seen those feelings still in evidence while she was with Robbie herself. How brutally disrespectful and disloyal of him.

Robbie just sees it all in typically straightforward fashion at this stage— _Water under the bridge now. She knows neither of us would have done that to her deliberately._ James finds he has no ability to believe that it can be that straightforward. Well, in general he simply tries not to think about it much at all. With some success. If there’s one thing James Hathaway has had considerable practice in, it’s in suppressing things.

He joins Robbie and Laura the odd time when they have an after-work drink, picking Robbie up, but making sure too that he chooses evenings when Julie will be there. Well, it’s always good to catch up with Julie anyway, hear how she’s finding his old role. And Julie, who certainly seems to get along much more easily with most of her colleagues than James ever did, also tends to casually invite most of Robbie’s team. It had rather brought home to him how he and Robbie had tended to function very much as a unit of two during his own sergeant days. But it also makes things easier for him in not quite interacting directly with Laura.

And then that initial instinct to avoid her, almost to withdraw a bit in her presence, had somehow, fight it as he does now, taken on a life on its own.

It might have been easier, after all, if he had been forced to see her in work in the aftermath and let her matter-of-fact friendliness just put that guilt to rest. It has been a while, hasn’t it? He does talk to Laura within that group setting; he just finds himself holding back a fair bit when he’s with Robbie in front of her. But he certainly hasn’t talked to her alone, in a conversation of any proper length, since—Christ, since before he left work. He’s rather shocked at himself. And yet—here she is tonight.

“D’you want to go outside for a bit?” Her voice cuts into his thoughts and he realises he’s just been sitting here silent again.

“Oh—I gave up a few months back.”

“I know that.” And in her pause he hears again an unspoken; _Robbie said._ “But for some air, a break from all this—” And her hand gesture somehow takes in the over-bright florescent lights, the edgy, waiting, not-quite-silence of a deserted waiting area and the whole bleakly oppressive atmosphere just bearing down on James’s overactive mind.

“No.”

“Okay.” And despite the abruptness of his refusal, her voice is as casual as if his resistance is perfectly acceptable. “Bet you’re well behind on all the station gossip, aren’t you?” she asks. “Well, I’m two weeks behind myself, but I’ll bet I’m still more up to date than Robbie ever is. There’s all sorts _you_ won’t know about…”

And she’s talking again, without seemingly requiring any particular input from him. He manages to follow most of it at first. But then he closes his eyes for a moment, trying to focus on her voice and what she’s saying, and that’s a very bad idea. That image that seems to have imprinted itself on the inside of his lids startles him back out of the more relaxed state he’d slipped into.

Laura has stopped and is looking at him harder again now. She hasn’t missed the startle. “What is it, James?” she asks. Her face is very kind.

He can’t really fight her consolation much longer. He offers up what should be the safer, first part of the story. The factual, more mundane part that should keep him away from the choppier waters of what he’d seen just after the crash—

“I took the first part of the drive,” he starts. “And then we swapped, and Robbie said—he said he’d take over now and wake me for the last part—” But he stops, overwhelmed again despite his best efforts. This time, though, it’s the memory of Robbie, leaning against the car in the over-bright service station forecourt, an island in the starry dark, above the red and white streams of taillights on the motorway below. Robbie, with his woollen jumper pulled on against the cold night, leaning against the car and joking, while he enjoyed the coffee James had fetched for him, about the lack of stamina in the young. Because James had pulled in when he’d started to feel tired. And that was why Robbie had taken over far before the planned switch at the halfway point. And he must then have decided to just let James sleep.

“Hey.” Laura is gently trying to get his attention, reaching to take the hand lying in his lap. Fuck. He can’t suppress the wince at the sudden stab of sharper pain.

“ _James.”_ And she’s gently supporting the aching wrist now. “You didn’t tell them about this?”

“There’s nothing much to tell, I’m sure it’s just a sprain.”

“Are you?” she asks.

He actually doesn’t feeI like lying to her. And not just because it would be a pretty pointless exercise. He gives a sigh and relinquishes the truth about this part.

“I honestly didn’t notice it properly at first, take it in. I was too busy, just talking to Robbie, making sure he was calm when we were waiting and he was sort of stunned. And then it seemed so trivial compared with him, not something to distract anyone with, you know? I just wanted to focus on him. And in the ambulance—they let me go with him, they said I should get checked for shock—he was still a bit out of it—I couldn’t get to talk to him—so I was just letting it lie on my lap. And when we got here, I just refused their assessment really, just left , I thought if they knew they'd send me off for x-rays and casts—” _And I can’t leave him here alone, I just can’t._

“Well, I don’t have x-ray vision, but—”

He just nods, closing his eyes for a moment once more as he cedes to the inevitable. He knows full well that he has to go downstairs and get this checked. He can’t really fool himself much longer. But closing his eyes is such a bad idea. There’s that vivid image, almost the worst one, just waiting to ambush him as soon as he removes his gaze from the comforting familiarity of Laura’s face.

“James?”

“He looked—on the stretcher, he kept closing his eyes and he was strapped to it, as a precaution, they said…”

“He looked worse than he is, then, I’ll guarantee you that,” she says gently. “Immobilised, that would have made him look worse. That’s what you need, James, is it? Is that why you’re sitting here? You need to just see he’s in one piece for yourself?”

He nods at her, relieved, suddenly understanding that, yes, that’s exactly what he needs, just to see and touch Robbie and make sure—

“Well, then,” she says, in matter-of-fact tones, getting up. “Let me see what I can do about that. But remember—” And she stops right in front of him and gives him a grin “—if I get you in to see him, you’ll be mine to command after that, then, Hathaway.”

===

Robbie isn’t asleep. He’s propped up on pillows, looking a bit pale, but still his blessedly familiar self. There’s a look of pure relief on his face when James levers the door slowly open, just in case he disturbs him. And if he sounds a bit gruffer than usual, that could be the lateness of the hour—“There you are.”

“They wouldn’t let me in to you—”

“They said you were all right, James. You’re all right?”

“Yeah. Are you—”

“I’ll be fine. Nothing that won’t mend soon enough. Bit bruised. It’s the concussion they’re keeping me in for. Tried to tell them, I did, I’ve got—”

“A head like an anvil, yes, I know.”

“They didn’t seem convinced,” Robbie says with a grin. “Come on, then, what are you doing all the way over there?” All the way over there is perhaps a whole step away now. But James accepts the invitation with relief, sinking down on the side of the bed, at Robbie’s hip.

Robbie regards him, eyes slightly narrowed.

“So, apart from my head and that hedge and the car, any other damage done?” he enquires, eventually. He’s assessing something, eyes searching James’s face.

“Some rather startled cows,” James offers.

“C’mere,” Robbie says, gently, raising an arm. James buries his face in his shoulder, feeling one large, warm hand cup the back of his head. He stays there for a moment, just tilted into Robbie, held, as best either of them can manage for now, breathing in Robbie’s scent.

“I wish you’d woken me,” he mutters eventually, into that shoulder.

“You reckon your driving skills are that much better than mine, that it?”

James raises his head to look at him and then raises himself back into a sitting position. Robbie’s hand rests warm on his back. “If you hadn’t driven most of the way, you wouldn’t have been so tired.”

“Oh, don’t be daft. ‘Course I wasn’t driving tired. Or asleep. We probably hit black ice. There was a warning on the radio earlier. What’s up with your arm?”

James says nothing at all.

Robbie raises his eyebrows at him. “Don’t think I’ve ever held you without getting held right back. With interest. And now seems a funny time for you to change your habits. What’s wrong with it?”

“Laura reckons the wrist might be broken,” he confesses reluctantly.

Robbie’s eyes search his face again. “And shouldn’t you perhaps be letting them downstairs in A and E know about that?” he suggests. James feels a flush heat his cheeks. “Go on, now. I’m fine, honest. Off with you and get that seen to properly. Bloody amazed Laura hasn’t got you down there already. Good that you called her, though.”

He looks so genuinely pleased at the thought that now doesn’t seem quite the time to explain how it was that Laura came to be here. It seems only fair to defend her, though. It’s not as if she’s been sitting there letting him avoid proper treatment all this time. “I said I would now if she could get me in to see you first…”

Robbie is rather amused. “Like that, is it? Not often someone gets the better of Laura. She must be losing her touch. James. She’s right, though. Go on. Before you do yourself more damage. That’s your guitar-holding hand.”

James feels his own eyebrows climb in pure indignation. “I don’t just _hold_ it with this hand—” But obviously he’s only playing right into Robbie’s hands.

“Yeah. Exactly. I mean it. Go on now. Not having you lose any mobility in that wrist.”

“I just—”

“Christ, things were easier sometimes when you were me sergeant,” Robbie mutters. “At least you pretended to listen to me then.”

“I do listen, you know I do, I just—”

And Robbie is suddenly intent. “What? What is it, James?”

But James can see it again now. It’s rising up to meet him even despite the real warm presence of Robbie. He swallows and tries to finally get it out of his head, to dilute the vividness of it into words. “There was just a moment,” he says with difficulty. “When I woke up to all of that. You were lying back with your eyes shut.”

“I was taking a moment, James, that’s all—” But then Robbie seems to take in what he’s saying. “Ah, love. Stuff of nightmares, isn’t it? Sorry. I am. C’mon now.” And there’s the side of Robbie’s hand cupping his face now, and his thigh is pressing against James’s hip as he seems to try and draw closer, draw James into him. And James gives a sigh and surrenders, dropping his head back down on that shoulder, feeling himself held again for a while, in safety.

“Go an’ get your hand looked at now, will you?” comes Robbie’s voice in his ear eventually. “I’ll only be fretting if you don’t.” And, James knows, that’s true. He draws himself back up, reluctantly, and looks at Robbie. Robbie seems to think he needs a bit more persuasion. “And I need me beauty sleep—well as much as I can get when this lot will keep waking me, asking me if I know my sodding name.”

James gets up off the bed. He can’t deny he yearns to be back in their own bed right at this moment, to roll over and settle himself against Robbie, much as he does when he wakes in the night, often eliciting a soft, satisfied grunt or a warm arm arranging itself against him. But this hold now seems to have been enough to finally settle that tight feeling in his chest. The solid comfort of Robbie has somehow done its work. Robbie, who is undeniably very much still here, and very much still Robbie.

“Don’t try telling them your name should be on your chart,” James advises as a parting shot. “They’ll have heard that one before.”

“Shame,” mutters Robbie, shifting in an attempt to get more comfortable. “There goes my first line of defence. James, I’ll be discharged before you get through the queue in A and E at this rate.”

===

“I’m going to have to call Lyn soon.” It sounds to Robbie as if James really isn’t relishing the prospect.

“Put her on to Laura,” Robbie suggests, “an’ they can have a professional discussion.” Laura’s expression as he looks over at her lets him know that he’s pushing his luck now. But she has no idea quite what Lyn, in combined anxious-daughter and practical-nurse mode, is about to subject James to. James can obviously take an educated guess.

“Rather you than me,” says Robbie to him. “It’ll have to be you, though. I can’t use me phone in here.” And he gestures with his head towards the sign above his bed, thoroughly unrepentant.

Robbie feels quite cheerful this morning, all things considered. The whole hazy ordeal of the accident seems rather like a bad dream, losing its power to disturb him in the light of the winter sun, angling now through the window. Laura has informed him that he should probably be cleared for discharge once the neuro consultant starts her rounds and James, despite looking rather like death not-much-warmed-over himself, and sporting a cast and sling, seems genuinely, oddly, rather content.

Even more odd is that James, who has always been reticent about displaying any physical touch in front of Laura, was not just straight over to Robbie for a quick but firm kiss this morning, he’s actually perching on the side of the bed again now, thigh pressing ever so slightly against Robbie’s thigh, his good arm resting on the bed so that his hand is very close to Robbie’s. Every so often Robbie feels James’s fingers tangle and untangle with his, playing with Robbie’s hand, as is his wont.

Laura certainly doesn’t seem to mind, although she never would have now, Robbie is quite sure. But something appears to have shifted a bit at last. He can see it in James. James’s awkwardness around Laura, the way he withdrew around her, and yet obviously tried so hard not to so that it had come to seem so unfair to press him—none of that struggle is in evidence in James this morning.

It had seemed distinctly unfair too that James was the one who had assumed the burden of guilt over what had happened with Robbie and Laura. It had just been bloody impossible to stop him. Although, God, Robbie had certainly tried, but to his slightly helpless frustration, James had always seemed to interpret Robbie’s clumsy efforts at reassurance— _Laura’s never blamed you, you know, come on now, ‘course she doesn’t_ —as further pressure to try and overcome his awkwardness around her. It had taken Robbie a little while to realise that, whatever helplessness he felt in the face of James’s struggle over this, James very much felt the same.

“I’ve got to get back, as soon as your consultant has been and gone,” Laura informs them both. “I’ve had a text to inform me that brunch will be made at my convenience.”

And Laura, Robbie has suspected for some time, has not only known but rather minded that the old established ease of her interactions with James had somehow tightened into this helpless holding back on James’s part. But now—

“Have we messed up the last day of your leave?” James surprises Robbie further by jumping straight in. “Did you two have plans?”

“Nothing so structured, no. Brunch and a siesta will do me just fine. Practically continental. Although—not very Germanic. Then I’ll be ready for this evening if we want to venture out for dinner. We do tend to stay in holiday mode until the eleventh hour, in the sense that I shouldn’t be back on the on call rota until tomorrow. Have to make the most of it.”

“You’ve been here all night and you can still contemplate heading out this evening once you’ve slept?” The mere thought of it makes Robbie feel even more tired. But he looks across at her and tilts his head and hopes he’s somehow conveying his own gratitude for that, her coming here and sitting with James.

The warmth in her eyes as she directs a shrug at him suggests she may understand what he’s trying to get across.

“ _She’ll_ be all right. She knows how to make vending machines dispense _strong coffee,_ ” James informs him in a loud stage whisper. Robbie tries to suppress his amusement at how impressed James must have been at that. And grateful, no doubt.

“And don’t you forget it,” Laura says to James. Well, he’s missing something here now, but he rather feels like it’s none of his business. And if James is meeting Laura’s eyes again, with that direct gaze, and a hint of pure amusement, that’s more than enough for Robbie. It _has_ eaten at Robbie a bit, James’s guilt over this and Robbie’s own inability to disperse it. Now it feels like quite a weight being lifted off at last. For something that doesn’t exactly come up much, that they’ve rather avoided discussing in the end, this had certainly cast its shadow.

“Jean sends her best,” Laura announces, turning back to him now.

“Innocent?” says Robbie, startled at the sudden intrusion of the spectre of his chief superintendent into this early morning interlude. He’s not due back at work for another couple of days.

“Well, it’s all around the station now, no doubt. She rang me as soon as she got in this morning. Once she’d established to her own particular satisfaction that you both really are all right, her main line of enquiry was about why you can’t even take a mini-break to Manchester without somehow creating more work at her nick. She was wondering why you couldn’t drive into ditches in someone else’s jurisdiction, I think.”

“Oh, that’s harsh, that is,” grumbles Robbie, secretly rather touched by the promptness of that phone call.

“And she wanted to let you know that from what Traffic worked out at the scene it looks like you hit a patch of black ice—oh, what now?” For Robbie is turning a distinctly triumphant look on a James who has already assumed a highly forbearing expression.

“Thought I fell asleep, he did,” Robbie informs Laura, who rolls her eyes at him, possibly at the tinge of smugness in his tone.

“Not asleep,” James clarifies. “I thought you were tired, there’s a difference.”

“Either way,” says Robbie, rather satisfied, “I’m cleared of both charges. Innocent man, here.”

Privately, he’s thoroughly relieved. He’d been fairly sure that he wouldn’t have tried to push through fatigue while driving, it’s not like he hasn’t seen the catastrophic effects that that decision can result in on the job.

But James had certainly looked worn out and had had the prospect of a tough enough week ahead of him, catching up on his research schedule after Manchester, and then that meeting with his tutor this morning, which was why they’d driven back last night. Well, all those plans are effectively out the window, James’s meeting is obviously getting rescheduled and he’ll be needing an extension now, anyway. But Robbie had certainly found himself loath to disturb him last night at the planned switching point.

He’d let the off ramp to that service station come and go, let it flash on by while he cast a look at the slouched, drowsing warm body beside him. James’s face had been turned towards Robbie even in sleep, much as he always seems to gravitate towards him even within the burrow of a warm bed. The radio had been murmuring low, it was a clear, sharp night, and cocooned in the car like this with James en route back to the ordinary rhythm of their days in Oxford, he’d felt a wash of sheer gratitude for just having James beside him, for the way his life was now.

And then lying here last night, not being able to clearly recall the moment of the accident, he had, despite his protests to James, been wondering what might have happened. Whether he’d been responsible for James being injured. And he’d known full well too that if fatigue on his part had had any role to play in this, then James, irrational as it would certainly seem to Robbie, would nevertheless have been the one carrying the guilt of this, of Robbie’s effects from the accident. James had been the one to push the decision about driving back last night, and he’d have berated himself for that when it had turned out he’d needed to hand over the driving so early in the journey. James’s propensity to guilt makes Robbie feel strangely helpless at times, the full force of it. And that further torment for James would have been the actual long term damage from this accident, thankfully now avoided.

“Black ice,” repeats Robbie, firmly now. He manages to mask his relief and deliver it with a distinct note of satisfaction, to both James and Laura, as his final pronouncement on the subject. They exchange a brief, long-suffering glance with each other, two sets of blond, eloquent eyebrows lifting in unison.

And it should probably irritate Robbie, really. This covert, mutual agreement that he's being slightly insufferable. But it doesn’t. Quite the opposite. Somehow, their old familiar complicity just settles something within him and warms him right through his being instead.

 

=======================================================================

 

There’s no illusion of warmth from the sunlight; the day is almost as clear and cold as last night had been. But Laura knows that, if she picks her spot, the relative quiet outside and the natural light will still be as thoroughly welcome as they’ve always been after she’s spent a night under those florescent lights.

She’s not about to drive herself home on her current low rations of sleep, not after all that, but she knows where to go while she waits for Franco. There’s a reliably empty, very familiar bench in a less-used part of the grounds. It’s so shadowed by the main building that there’s still a glimmering of frost on the concrete path this morning. And, she realises, with a swell of pleasure as she approaches it, she can just take it for granted by now that he’ll know to find her here too.

She’s just thoroughly glad that Julie had thought to call her—more than glad, she’s relieved. She sincerely does not like the idea that James could have sat there injured and alone all night. And while she knows he must eventually have gone to get that wrist set of his own accord, he had seemed so—not in shock, strictly speaking, but she can certainly see why the paramedics might have suspected he was initially. Traumatised. By the shock of seeing Robbie like that, it turned out, on top of the accident that must have startled him awake in brutal fashion. And then there had obviously come the pain that he wouldn’t give in to.

She’s relieved on quite another level, though. She’d been beginning to think that the distance that had somehow become levered between her and James was going to settle into something insurmountable and permanent.

Laura had had to discreetly intervene in the early hours of this morning after they’d waited for some time in A&E together. James, she’d thought, would probably see her intervention as queue-jumping. Which it wasn’t. She’d genuinely wondered if he shouldn’t be a higher priority, all things considered. Whether they’d put enough weight on when the accident had occurred, rather than when he’d first presented. And James had seemed exhausted after he’d seen Robbie. He’d almost fallen asleep in one of those impossible chairs in the waiting area and had only startled awake as his arm had moved as he drowsed off, obviously sending a further stab of pain through his drowsy fogged state. That had been her tipping point. A brisk but friendly discussion with one of the senior nurses she knows hadn’t gone awry.

But she’d certainly made sure she’d managed to carry out that discussion out of earshot of James. She’s come up full force against his personal code of ethics now and the way it seems to torment him and she hadn’t been about to risk finding out if it extended to things like this.

She can still acutely remember the moment when she’d realised quite what this had done to James, what had happened between her and Robbie.

A post-work drink had been arranged and Robbie had texted James to join them. It had been a little while somehow since she’d seen James, not since he and Robbie had finally got together, actually. So she’d been pleased when he arrived, smiling over at him as he slid in beside Robbie, but still distracted by her ongoing conversation with Julie. Up until the point when Julie’s mobile had summoned her attention and she’d disappeared outside.

Laura still hadn’t seen anything amiss, turning to join in whatever slight bickering Robbie, obviously thoroughly enjoying himself, had already started to engage in with James. And then Julie had beckoned her governor from the door, something perhaps breaking on their case, after all, and Laura had turned to James, wanting to hear all about his acceptance onto this course—Robbie had been so thoroughly, touchingly proud about that. And James had stared straight across the table at her for a moment, from the opposite bench, stricken. She’d felt her own smile falter in response. Then he’d risen so hurriedly, offering to get her a drink, not meeting her eyes at all but looking rather helpless somehow so that it seemed only fair to just accept and let him go—by the time he’d returned, Robbie was back and James had started trying rather desperately to act as if nothing was wrong at all. Leaving her thoroughly disconcerted.

Because there was no chance of ever getting James Hathaway to talk something like this through with her. That was a hopeless proposition. The only way to try and get at it was to go through Robbie. And then it had turned out that her efforts there had been doomed to failure too.

“Does James understand I don’t hold anything against him for what happened?” she’d enquired, the next time she’d shared a quick coffee break with him at the station.

Robbie had immediately lowered his cup, abandoning his cooling coffee, and the look that had passed very briefly over his face was a shadow of that wretched one that had appeared that night when he’d finally begun to grasp that he actually needed to make a choice, between her and James. He knew exactly why she was asking too.

“Well—he’s certainly been told,” he’d told her, slowly, meeting her eyes all right but his tone really not inspiring much confidence in her. “And he can be told again—”

And she’d realised then that she couldn’t thrash this out with Robbie, who obviously doesn’t dwell on this but equally obviously is still hit with discomfort any time she gets near the topic. She’d had no doubt he’d have done his level best, in his own way, to convince James that none of this had been his doing, anyway. And so she’d simply been as gentle as she knew how to be, not pushed things, and hoped James would come to see over time that she really didn’t blame him. But she’d begun to fear after a while that it might not be enough. Just as Robbie’s best in this instance obviously wasn’t quite going to be enough either. Robbie’s reassurances and his own pragmatic view on this apparently couldn’t quite reach the spot here for James. Whenever she thought of that look of helplessness, she knew her blaming him wasn’t really the problem—it was him blaming himself in a way neither she, nor even Robbie, would be able to reach.

And it had eventually occurred to her, perhaps naively, that James’s struggle would resolve itself, anyway, surely, as her own relationship with Franco redeveloped—and then began to become something more than it had been the first time around.

It had been a bit of a revelation to her when she’d realised that, if Robbie could get around his mental block of seeing another man as a partner, then surely she could reconsider this idea that mere distance meant a relationship would be too difficult to pursue? Long-distance relationships were rather different now than they had been anyway, back when she and Franco had first found their careers diverging off into different cities in different countries. And, thankfully, they hadn’t actually had to challenge themselves with a long-distance relationship this time for too long. Belgium, where Franco had been based when they’d started to explore this, had certainly had its compensations. But having him back permanently in Oxford since Christmas—well, that’s far more of a delight. It had certainly rather consumed most of her attentions outside work, in very pleasurable fashion.

But it had still been quite hard to watch James whenever she’d seen him—to realise quite how much he cared about what he thought he’d done and yet have her hands tied dealing with it. It was frustrating to think how, with any other friend, she could obviously have raised the topic. James, though—friendship with James has always been an odd if valuable beast. Perhaps all the more worthwhile for being rather hard-won and different. Because she certainly suspects he doesn’t make close friends easily and that’s presumably part of why he holds himself to pretty high personal standards of loyalty for those he has. She’d just had no real idea quite how high.

If there hadn’t been quite so much else to think about back then, as she and Robbie stuttered to a halt in their relationship, as the real extent of what Robbie felt for James had finally dawned on her, then one of them, knowing James, might have predicted this. But it had been Robbie, with his stalwart, loyal heart that she had been concerned for—he had been so appalled at himself back then. And deeply worried that he’d hurt her. Then once he’d really grasped that she was all right, even with him moving on to James, he’d been fine, a far simpler proposition to deal with. It was James, in all his tortured loyalty and his own kind-heartedness, who’d had had far more difficulty than anticipated. But also in his concern for her. His unnecessary concern.

Because she really shouldn’t be causing concern to anyone. And she reckons that’s finally hit home to him now. That must be a large part of what’s making her feel so content this morning. Well, seeing them both safe and relatively unharmed and leaving them bickering away mildly again while they wait for Robbie to be officially discharged, that had also had its own welcome effect. That had effectively obliterated the jolt from that phone call last night when she had taken in what Julie was saying—that it was people who belonged to her who had been hurt this time, not a stranger who was past assistance but waiting for her to do her job.

The loss of one night’s sleep and keeping James company in a ridiculous amount of coffee—what is his caffeine tolerance _like_?— to gain back that old ease with him seems somehow a very reasonable price to pay.

Which is just as well in the circumstances, she tells herself cheerfully, as she spots Franco appearing around the corner. His features are already moving into that much-loved quick, soft grin, a very particular grin, that always seems directed straight at her. Because there’s no need whatsoever for anyone to worry about Laura’s heart. It’s perfectly happy these days, she reflects, as she starts to grin in response.


End file.
